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Monica

Today was originally scheduled to be the last team run of the off-season. I was a little sad, not because it was the last run, but because we didn’t have the day off because man, I really wanted to sleep in for Easter. While it was an “optional” practice, it was also “highly recommended” and I would’ve felt bad sleeping while the rest of the team was at practice.

Fortunately! Through a joint effort, Gavin was persuaded to allow us to replace the run with a different kind of activity: ultimate frisbee!

She downloaded this app called MyFitnessPal that tracks calories in/out (food, exercise, etc.) and I thought it was really interesting. It has quite an extensive arsenal of brands and foods (though not so much for exercise). I finally decided to install it and try it out for several reasons, one of those reasons being I was interested in seeing how my food and daily activities pan out numerically. Another reason is I kind of want to lose weight because pullups and endurance bench are so much easier at lighter weights (Marcella has to lift nothing!) and exercise hasn’t been doing it for me (ugh, cardio!) and diet is supposed to be the way to go for that anyway. Though I consider myself somewhat reasonably fit, I do have unnecessary fat I could afford to get rid of. Plus, I probably do eat too much normally anyway (I eat a lot).

Now, you may be thinking “there’s no such thing as too much cake.” In fact, there both is and isn’t such a thing. There isn’t a thing as too much cake if your purpose is to be happy. However, there is definitely a thing as too much cake if your purpose is to not feel like a pig.

Apparently, in one of the old labs that Mahmoud used to work in, people would bring in cake as a celebration whenever they got a paper published (the first author, that is) and Mahmoud wanted to carry on that tradition here. He and Brenda got a paper published recently in JACS (Journal of the American Chemical Society), which is a very good journal, and he wanted to celebrate. Mahmoud likes to go all out; he went and bought TWO cakes on Monday for our lab’s group meeting. He got this very excellent chocolate cake (a Lindt Swiss chocolate one) and a fluffy cheesecake topped with glazed fruit.